Who needs words in 2012?

As I write this, New Zealand and Australia already stumbled into 2012. We will follow in about 9 hours. What better time for reflection and prediction?

Just before Christmas, while reviewing some fresh web copy, somebody said: “People are not reading online, they only scan copy”. The comment threw me back 15 years, to the early days of my career.

Fl. 5.000,- website scan
Back then, I was a copywriter with an agency. The internet was quite new, at least to the Dutch masses, and as most organisations, our clients struggled to understand specific requirements of the web, and how to integrate it into their overall marketing and communication strategies. We thought we knew better, and helped them out. In “Writing for the web” courses, we would say things like “Use short sentences”, “Try to use bulleted lists”, “Remember: Keep it simple; just one topic per paragraph”, and “Subheadings give your copy a solid structure, and will give you a higher ranking in Altavista and Netscape”. For 5000 Dutch guilders (~EUR2250, ~USD3000), we offered a “Website scan”. It was good business. Google had just arrived. I received 15 emails per day. If even.

I may sound like an old badger to you. Social media are in about the same place right now. I think I received 15 emails a day in December with offers for a Social Media scan.

2 weeks to respond
I joined that agency right after college. One of my professors hated email. He said: “They hooked me up with an email account. I hate email. You know what? If I receive a written letter, I read it once, twice, three times before I put it down. I usually take a couple of days to think about the letter, and my response. I sit down to write. Sometimes I write three versions before manually copying it onto my letterhead. It’s a very personal thing, I will never ask my assistant to do it. Out of the question! So on average, I need about two weeks to respond to a letter. On average, I receive about 10 letters a week. It’s quite different with email. I receive an email, and if I didn’t respond within – say – 2 days, the guy rings me and says: “Hey I sent you an email, can you please respond?”. And I already receive 10 emails a day. I hate it, it’s impossible for me to correspond like that!”

No doubt
In a recent magazine interview, somebody said: “This is the age of the opinion. Everybody has an opinion on just about everything. There seems to be less and less room for ambivalence and doubt. It’s actually quite okay to have an opinion based on just limited subject knowledge.”

We don’t read. We scan and have an opinion anyway. So who needs words in 2012? My prediction: Next year, Twitter will tune down to just 70 characters per tweet – commas and question marks will no longer be allowed.

Top 5 blog posts 2011
For this blog, these 5 posts drew most attention, comments and retweets:

1. The Corporate Website is Dead
2. The Corporate Website is Dead (Continued)
3. Brands like friends
4. Social Media ROI. Rubbish. It’s free!
5. The Real Cost of Marketing Automation (Pizza Anyone?)

Happy 2012!

Next: Apple iBrain 1

Yeah why not. Check out the latest updates on Apple’s patent applications, and you’ll agree: They have reached the point where the only thing left to enhance is the human body proper.

Keyboards are gone. Wires are gone. Interfaces have become super intuitive and user friendly. Recent patents show they want to share files by literally pouring them from one device into the next. What about Wifi Power, the idea to charge iPhones, Pads, and Pods just by putting them close to the electricity socket. No strings attached.

Apple are about to bridge the gap between the human brain and technology. And with batteries that can be charged without a cord, they have cleared the road for the ultimate move: get rid of the devices, and join the brain and the technology together.

It shouldn’t take more than a couple of years to browse the web with a wink of the eye, deviceless. To pay electronically by nodding at the sales rep. To watch a movie, learn a language, meet new people by just sitting in your chair with your eyes closed. (Provided the chair is next to a power point, otherwise you’ll start hibernating right in the middle of Shrek 8 – I warned you!).

Sometime soon, our minds will live online, on an Apple pay-per-use subscription. They’ll charge extra for thoughts on ugly things (and Steve Ballmer). And we’ll be less equal.

B2B Content Strategy in 5D

A sales guy knows that no two prospects are the same. Hence, no two sales conversations are identical. You know what? You can even have a great sales conversation with some guy on Friday, to be told “bugger off” by that same guy on Monday morning. Some prospects – like other humans - display inconsistent behavior from time to time. Perhaps more so on Monday morning, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s hard to predict audience behavior.

That’s why content marketing - the art of putting the right content in front of the right audience at the right time through the right vehicles or platforms - can be quite a challenge. What’s right for some prospect, may be very wrong for another. And in business buying situations, you deal with decision makers, influencers, purchasing departments, consultants – it’s not always, or always never, clear who is buying to begin with. So what’s the right audience? Anyway, I wrote about this before.

The good folks over at JESS3 created a Content Marketing infographic on two dimensions. (1) They map content vehicles and assets on the buyer’s journey (Awareness, Consideration, Close), and (2) they recommend the channels through which the content is to be distributed to the target audience (Twitter, website, etc). The result is a pretty great infographic – if social media have revolutionized one more thing on top of just The Way Humans Communicate, it is the genre of the Infographic. If  a picture says more than a thousand words, an infographic conveys more than a thousand metrics… And so much for lousy analogies. Apologies. 

Anyway, though being a great infographic, it’s not granular enough, and as such quite useless in b2b sales situations. To come up with an effective content strategy, b2b marketers need at least 3 more dimensions than the 2 already mentioned above:

1. Customer vs. non customer
2. Decision Maker vs. Influencer
3. Direct sales vs. Indirect sales

Customers and non-customers may receive some of the same assets, but face-to-face time with account management, customer support, and other customers have to be taken into account. Information requirements for decision makers and influencers cannot be compared. And if you do not own the relationship with a target account, the communications setup is entirely different – makes it hard to control the content flow to begin with.

Does that mean that content marketing should be ruled out in b2b environments? No – but marketers will have to spend more time on data management, segmentation and prioritisation. Because it will take an army of marketers, creatives, writers, and producers to cover 5 dimensions, through 3 buyer’s journey phases, times 30 assets. That’s just too many options.

So pick your battles wisely. And allways enjoy your infographics!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The α and ω of Internal Communications

I
Imagine an international company of 2000 employees with no intranet (or wiki’s, or Yammer), no employee newsletter in print or email, no bulletin boards, no narrow casting screens, no regular employee all hands meeting. Basically, this company doesn’t have an internal communications function, wouldn’t you agree?

Then imagine I gave you – brilliant marketing and communications strategist – EUR100,000 of my budget, and asked you to establish a channel for internal communications, and maintain it for one year. It’s an open brief, and the executive team is fully behind you.

What would you do?

II
Every 6 months, I run an event for all European employees of the company. We use it to look back, recognise the most valuable contributors to the company’s success, and look forward to what’s ahead of us. Since our VP EMEA said he wouldn’t have his workforce travel to a central location for the event (“It doesn’t generate direct revenue, so let’s find a cost efficient format”), we were forced to come up with something special.

With our partner Quadia, we created a live and interactive television show, broadcasted to all offices across EMEA. A state-of-the-art event, with professional host (the eminent Ronnie Overgoor), director, rehearsals, floor manager, TV crew, make-up – the whole shabang. We pre-record video items, ask employees to create content, and give them the opportunity to send in their questions and concerns.

Usually, the employee feedback on the event is 10 out of 10. The next edition will be in June. It’s a big thing.

III
But how does one calculate the ROI of internal communications?

If I knew what Einstein knew

In society, people can’t process the growing number of messages that are fired at them all day long. They don’t bother to. In companies, people receive so many emails, and have to consult so many different sources of information, that they can’t read all of it any longer. And they’re not even trying to. It’s therefore impossible for government or management to reach all of society, or all of the company. That’s ok.

For individuals and companies alike, picking up on exactly the right conversations, emails, trends, messages, signals, and the speed at which one is able to process data and turn it around into valuable information and relevant response is what makes all of the difference. Not individual data points. Eventually, everybody will potentially have access to all data, secure or insecure. That’s ok.

You see, if I knew what Einstein knew, I surely wouldn’t be able to come up with relativity theory. It takes a brain like Einstein’s to do it.

If I have all the information Apple has for iPod 5, I will definitely not be able to come up with the prototype. It takes a company with the capabilities of Apple to do it.

That’s why governments shouldn’t worry about WikiLeaks. Why companies shouldn’t worry about securing their internal information. Instead, they should focus on their capabilities to combine data faster and better than their competitors. It’s the only source of sustainable competitive advantage left.

Most don’t. They will go away.  And that’s ok, too.

On globalising content marketing strategies

A piece of conversation I overheard this week:

- “…so if we launch a marketing program to drive market awareness, and we agree that paid, owned and earned media are the 3 pillars of the strategy, we should have these 3 pillars in place whereever in the world we chose to launch the program, shouldn’t we?
- …
- “I mean, if it’s an integrated strategy, you can’t just take one of three pillars out and expect the building to still be in place next time you check, can you? The entire setup of the program has to change from the very outset if it is to run globally. Simply because we do not have budgets in place everywhere.”
- …
- “You tell me: How do I bring a $5 million marketing program to market without any budget?
- …
- “If everything is integrated, which it better be, than you can’t take pieces out without screwing up the whole. If that’s what you want to do, then change the program strategy!”

Tough discussions – and obviously, the message was not really resonating on the other end of the line. But the point is very clear and vital: with global corporations integrating their marketing communications strategies, trying to have a bigger impact through consistency, tight integration of efforts and focus, global planning of resources has more than ever become a key success factor. What works in the US, doesn’t necessarily work in Spain, or Singapore. So if the source communication strategy is being conceived in country A, and generates the right level of response in that market, it still needs a lot of work to have the same impact in countries B and C.

Some time ago I defined content marketing as “delivering the right message, in the right vehicle, to the right audience at the right time, and through the right channels of communications”. Content Marketing is a fastly maturing discipline, potentially touching a company’s brand, marketing and communications strategy at the foundational level.

We recently were introduced to the thinking of research firm Forrester Research on this topic. Their consultants presented a new way of mapping content and messaging to the buyer’s journey. The data – taken from many surveys with business buyers across the globe – shed new light on information consumption patterns within B2B decision making units.

3 data points can be retrieved from the Forrester data (per country, per job role):

1. Which job role is most influential in each of the phases of the buyer’s journey (with phases like information gathering, education, consideration, decision making, purchasing). Key take-away: No single job role has more than 20% of influence per phase of the buyer’s journey. Marketers should target at least 2 to have the desired impact of companies continuing there journey until sending in the purchase order.
2. In each of the phases of the buyer’s journey, where does each job role look to find information relevant to that particular phase? To websites, events, webcasts, magazines et cetera? Key take-away: you need to cover no more than a handful of content sources to guide your target personas through their journey – o, and the mix is different per country.
3. What exactly are they hoping to find in those content sources. This will give you a good idea about which content specifically to put into brochures, whitepapers, video’s, landing pages, animations, calculators et cetera.

If the data is rich enough for the country you’re drilling into, these 3 views combined give you a recipee for impactful content marketing; you know who to target in each of the phases of the buyer’s journey, which media and content vehicles to seed and deploy, and the kind of content to put into each of those assets. This is the perfect foundation for a highly targeted content marketing strategy.

There is much more to content marketing. I recently discovered this great blog by Christine Thompson, who is a consultant with Seattle-based marketing firm Informing Arts, and who is an expert on the topic. She’s working on a “Content Strategy Maturity Model”. This model should enable marketing leaders to link content strategy to the broader realm of business strategy, in order to deliver enough ROI to make a real difference for the enterprise. It’s inspiring stuff, so go check it out.

To build a position in the Cloud…

This week, my company NetApp launched a new visual identity. Check it out before you continue: www.netapp.com

Did you ever bring a new product to market? I bet the positioning piece was the hardest part of it. Getting aligned with business goals, thoroughly understanding the competitive landscape, writing a crisp positioning statement, followed by a sound value proposition can be quite a cathartic experience for the business leadership and the marketing teams involved. You spend a year on research, sessions with the board, with internal and external stakeholders, going through several rounds of SWOT analyses, trying to avoid marketing myopia (if you don’t know what this is, read this – a marketing classic from the 60′s. YEAH!), just to understand how you’re going to market. It’s essential to get it right, because it will determine your every next move, and in the end mean the difference between succeeding or failing. And usually, everyone involved understands this, so the stakes are high – that’s what makes it hard and painful.

Some years ago, at my previous company, we were asked to bring a new software to market, opening up the SaaS category for that particular type of solution in the Dutch market. Within 6 weeks. Great learning experience, and indeed, the positioning piece took us over 3 weeks. The rest was mere execution.

And that was just about positioning a single product… Imagine what happens if you’re trying to find a differentiated position for a global brand in an ever consolidating, high speed, dog-eat-dog business environment, like my company NetApp in today’s IT industry – where every single vendor is working hard to gain sustainable competitive advantage and build a defendable position in the Cloud space.

Cloud, or shared infrastructure as it is often referred to, has the potential to turn every best-of-breed solution into an ingredient of a broader value proposition – simply because many solutions together make up a cloud infrastructure. With that, Intel’s brand challenge has become everybody’s issue in 2011.

This week, my company NetApp launched a new visual identity, to keep up with the differentiated position of our Cloud solutions and services portfolio. The new look & feel is personable to a level that’s rarely seen within the IT industry: it’s made up of hand drawn, colourful, abstract illustrations, there is a new handwritten font, and the more foundational illustrations depict customer success stories. It has gone from a techy, masculin, blue-black-and-white-with-lots-of-stock-photography look-and-feel to a more feminine, open, likeable, creative presentation, with a clear emotional dimension.

Have a look yourself: Successful Businesses Are Built On NetApp – featuring the business transformation story of our customer Suncorp.

The new visual style is different enough to match the quality of our solutions and services – we’re anxious to see how the market responds to our new appearence.

How do you like our new brand looks?